The president of Grove College has recommended that the college abandon its century-old tradition of all-female education and begin admitting men. Pointing to other all-female colleges that experienced an increase in applications after adopting coeducatio

According to the text, the president and director were in favor of opposite administrative policies towards Grove College. The president expected significant increase in applications and enrollment with adopting coeducation while the director intended to keep the all-female status as century-old tradition. To evaluate these claims, some questions are waiting for answers.

Firstly, concerning the president’s insistence, was the increase in applications of other all-female colleges not affected by some other operative enactment at the same time while adopting coeducation? Enactments such as cheaper tuition fees, provision of various curriculums design, or lower the limitation of accessing the colleges, are also attractive to students thus to apply for these colleges. Take the lab I attended in Tsing Hua University for instance, one of the norm is that only one variable factor contains in each experiment or testing at one time, so that there will be no doubt to proved that the outcome is decisive by that only variable factor.

Secondly, even if the application and enrollment were increased due to coeducation, were the increment composed of more male than female disproportionally? Provided it was much more male registration than female did, the application and enrollment might not be lasting for long due to sexual unbalance that can be negative impact to student who prefer coeducation environment. For example, students in Taiwan prefer to choose coeducational college since they can have more colorful life and learn social manner by getting along with both male and female students in college.

Thirdly, on the other hand, as to director’s standpoint of view, incoming students conducted the annual surveys cited by the director. However, these interviewees were targeted at those who have firmed preference to all-female education rather than other factors. It is obvious that the result of survey would show preferred outcomes with bias opinion. Did the survey assign to not only the incoming student but also those students who have neutral preference or those who are still considering which college to go, let’s say, potential student? Further more, what were the actually valid survey results among the total surveys that had been assigned? If the valid survey results accounted for very small portion of the whole, the statistic result could not be persuasive enough as representative. As the proverb indicates: “One swallow does not make a summer”, how reliable was the survey to validate the director’s standpoint of view need to be taken into account.

The last but not the least, to what extent were the Grove alumnae feedbacks to the survey worthy to take in to account for making administrative decision for Grove college’s future development? Those alumnae’s interests were no longer related to Grove as they have graduated from college. Based on this, could these alumnae provide feedback with lack of enthusiasm thus leading to perfunctory responses? Take peers and myself for example, we usually do not spend too much time and attention on survey from our school for teaching quality satisfaction investigation. Most of the time we just made sure we have ticked all the blank but not really care about what had been written on, since we did not think our opinion would be referred effectively.

To make the contentions from either the president or president more convincing, the questions mentioned above must be addressed.